CABINET in the SKY

A few quick musings on the new cabinet. After having a really atrocious election, fluffing and blustering through interviews on subjects she did not grasp, Theresa May is the new Home Secretary, far higher up the ranks than she ever was in opposition. There’s only one explanation and that is Cameron’s dire shortage of women in his new team, even fewer than Gordon Brown had. Indeed, she, Caroline Spelman at Environment and Cheryl Gillan in the Welsh Office are the only women announced and May has to double up on policy for women and equality. Although Sayeeda Warsi will attend cabinet too, you can’t call hers a government post because she is there as party co-chairman under the age-old non-job title of Minister Without Portfolio. Her fellow co-chairman, Andrew Feldman, will not attend cabinet. The Lib Dems, even more poorly supplied with leading women, bring none to the cabinet, though Sarah Teather has often been touted as of ministerial potential.

Though he has found a position for Iain Duncan Smith to go with fellow ex-party leader William Hague, Cameron has given nothing to his erstwhile leadership rival David Davis. I wonder whether he offered and was refused or whether he has written Davis out of the history of his rise.

Meanwhile, the only gay member of Cameron’s shadow cabinet, Nick Herbert, is one of the casualties of coalition. No one outside his circle evidently knows whether the apparently monastic Lib Dem David Laws would be qualified to fill this breach. Talking of sexual chemistry (which I wasn’t), I learn that the new Foreign Secretary is flying to Washington as early as this Friday. You can bet your life, however, that Hillary Clinton will not go all giggly and moist over William Hague to quite the degree that she very publicly did over David Miliband. She will be fervently hoping that Miliband is indeed the shoo-in to be Labour leader that he clearly looks. It seems weird that, were the boyish Miliband to succeed, he would be the oldest leader among those of the three main parties, if only by fifteen months.